Abstract
The pressures of politics, the desire to be first in innovation, moral convictions, and the potential dangers of error are all factors that have long been at work in the history of science and technology. Every so often, the need to reach a result may require leaving out a few steps here and there. Historians think and argue best through stories, so what follows are several tales, each of which exemplifies one or more of these aspects, though some reach back nearly two hundred years. The first concerns the depletion of the ozone layer; the second involves the discovery of electric waves by Heinrich Hertz in 1888; the third concerns the controlled production of electromagnetic radiation by Guglielmo Marconi and John Ambrose Fleming in the early 1900s; the fourth portrays the circumstances surrounding Joseph von Fraunhofer’s discovery and use of the spectral lines in the 1810s; our final case involves a bitter controversy between the physicist Hermann von Helmholtz and the astronomer Friedrich Zöllner in the 1890s.
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Each of the examples considered here derives from the following publications, where full details can be found. On the ozone layer: Jed Z. Buchwald and George Smith, “The Ozone Layer (review),” American Scientist 89 (2001), 546–49. On Hertz: Jed Z. Buchwald, The Creation of Scientific Effects: Heinrich Hertz and Electric Waves (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994) and Manuel G. Doncel, “On the Process of Hertz’s Conversion to Hertzian Waves,” Archive for History of Exact Sciences 43 (1991), 1–27. On Fraunhofer: Myles W. Jackson, Spectrum of Belief: Joseph von Fraunhofer and the Craft of Precision Optics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000). On Marconi and Fleming: Sungook Hong, Wireless: From Marconi’s Black-Box to the Audion (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001). On Helmholtz: Jed Z. Buchwald, “Helmholtz’s Electrodynamics in Context: Object States, Laboratory Practice and Anti–Idealism,” in Hermann von Helmholtz and the Foundations of Nineteenth-Century Science, ed. David Cahan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 334–73.
To wit, the egregious, apocalyptic Left Behind series by the Christian dispensationalist and John Birch Society member Tim LaHaye, co-authored with Jerry B. Jenkins.
Johanna Hertz, ed., Heinrich Hertz: Memoirs, Letters, Diaries, 2nd enl. ed., trans. L. Brinner, M. Hertz, and C. Susskind (San Francisco: San Francisco Press, 1977).
Ibid., 237.
Heinrich Hertz, Electric Waves, being Researches on the Propagation of Electric Action with Finite Velocity through Space, trans. D. E. Jones (1893; New York: Dover, 1963), 8.
Hertz, Memoirs (ref. 3), 255.
Quoted in Jed Z. Buchwald, “Reflections on Hertz and the Hertzian Dipole,” in Heinrich Hertz: Classical Physicist, Modern Philosopher, ed. D. Baird, R. I. Hughes, and Alfred Nordmann (Dordrecht: Springer, 1998), 269–280, on 269.
H. Helmholtz, “Helmholtz on the Use and Abuse of the Deductive Method in Physical Science,” trans. Crum Brown, Nature 11 (1874), 149–51.
Quoted in Buchwald, “Helmholtz’s Electrodynamics” (ref. 1), 372.
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Jed Z. Buchwald is the Doris and Henry Dreyfuss Professor of History at the California Institute of Technology. He has authored or co-authored five books, most recently Newton and the Origin of Civilization (Princeton, 2012) with Mordechai Feingold.
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Buchwald, J.Z. Politics, Morality, Innovation, and Misrepresentation in Physical Science and Technology. Phys. Perspect. 18, 283–300 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00016-016-0187-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00016-016-0187-y